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Index
- Hilary Radner, University of Otago, Alistair Fox, University of Otago
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- Raymond Bellour
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- 07 March 2018, pp 217-222
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1 - Film Analysis: Image and Movement
- Hilary Radner, University of Otago, Alistair Fox, University of Otago
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- Raymond Bellour
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A LITERARY SENSIBILITY
Grounded in the French tradition of “explication du texte” as a means of approaching literature, and formed by his initial postgraduate work on French poetry (on Henri Michaux, in particular), Raymond Bellour was among the first film scholars to bring a French literary sensibility to the analysis of classical Hollywood film, which enabled him to recognize the rhetorical refinements of the cinematic medium and its potential for poetic expression. One of his most important contributions to the practice of film analysis, therefore, was his application of the techniques of literary analysis to the “body” of a film, specifically by paying close attention to shots, frame by frame, in order to identify the rhythms and repetitions that structure its presentation, as well as its apprehension by the spectator.
His work in this area was widely circulated in the form of individual articles and book chapters in French and English, and then anthologized in a volume in French in 1979 (reprinted in 1995), with the latter belatedly translated into English as The Analysis of Film (Bloomington: Indiana Press, 2000). The studies included in this English-language book would prove influential because they provided a tool that served to highlight the sophistication of cinema as a visual medium, thereby lending it legitimacy as an art form. Bellour showed that the apparent transparency of film narrative masked the opacity of its mechanisms of expression, which owed their efficacy to a hidden complexity rivaling the hermetic strategies that had become the hallmark of modernism.
The specificity of Bellour's approach was shaped by a set of contradictory intellectual currents arising out of structuralism, on the one hand, especially the work of Christian Metz (a grammarian by training), expressed most obviously in the latter's concept of the grande syntagmatiqueand, on the other, by psychoanalysis (both Freudian and Lacanian), and by the later work of Roland Barthes. The influence of the latter led Bellour to an impasse in which his structuralist tendencies were at odds with his engagement with Barthes. This is expressed most vividly in his 1985 article “L’Analyse flambée,” translated somewhat misleadingly as “Analysis in Flames,” in which he was interpreted by scholars as announcing the death of film analysis – such as by Constance Penley in her preface to the English version of Film Analysis in 2000.
6 - Film Analysis and the Symbolic
- Hilary Radner, University of Otago, Alistair Fox, University of Otago
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- Raymond Bellour
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- 07 March 2018, pp 105-118
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[Bellour explains the difference between Christian Metz's semiological approach and his own approach to film analysis, and the degrees to which he became disenchanted with psychoanalysis, despite his debt to Lacan's notion of the imaginary, the real, and the symbolic. With reference to his analysis of Hitchcock's North by Northwest, he proceeds to comment on how he evolved such key notions as “symbolic blockage” and “the undiscoverable text,” and proceeds to describe the influence of the Anti-Oedipus by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and his interest in American cinema and filmmakers like Alfred Hitchcock, Michael Curtiz, and Fritz Lang.]
In 1979, you published The Analysis of Film, a compilation of essays, the earliest of which go back to 1966. All of them occurred during the era of structuralism, but the publication of this book also coincided with its historical decline, and its debunking by theorists. Also, in the introduction to the book, you state that you eliminated the word “structural” from the title. Why? Does this mean that these essays cannot be categorized under that banner, and that something else was already beginning to take shape in the book?
As I was explaining to you just now, the reason I did not want to call this book “The Structural Analysis of Film” was so that I could avoid adopting any kind of a recurrent method in my work as a whole that could be reductively objectified. Whatever reinforcement I might have found in the analytical approaches of different authors, such borrowings never took the form of the application of a single method. At the time when I wrote the preface to this compilation of essays, which Christian Metz had persuaded me to assemble, structuralism seemed both dated and ahistorical, at least to me; one could see that beyond structuralist methods proper and their formal applications in the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, the way structure worked within the context of analyses could not be reduced to the lineaments of a model that existed outside it. Just think of the infinitely subtle play that is deployed in Barthes's works, especially in A Lover's Discourse: Fragments (1977), in which the effects of structure extend into events, ever more minute accidents that are irreducible to any meaning by which they could be constrained.
Select List of Sources Cited
- Hilary Radner, University of Otago, Alistair Fox, University of Otago
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- 07 March 2018, pp 210-216
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9 - Spectators, Dispositifs, and the Cinematic Body
- Hilary Radner, University of Otago, Alistair Fox, University of Otago
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- Raymond Bellour
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- 07 March 2018, pp 145-154
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[Bellour explains why he returned to a preoccupation with cinema in general, and the spectator in particular, and how he came to write Le Corps du cinéma, emphasizing his interest in the diverse dispositifs represented by Foucault's Panopticon on one hand, and by the phenomena of panoramas and phantasmagorias on the other. He describes how his discovery of Daniel Stern's The Interpersonal World of the Infant marked a critical turning point, leading him to explore an analogy between the infant and a spectator watching a film in the cinema – an analogy that enabled him to break with the psychoanalytic model, reflected in his eventual substitution of the notion of the body for that of the text.]
The four books that mark the different stages of your intellectual journey during the past three decades seem, on each occasion, to have taken a sort of malicious pleasure in foiling the dominant discourse of the period in which they have burst on to the scene: at the time when there was a desperate defense of a cinema-citadel, in Between-the-Images you dealt with what lay at its borders; when, toward the beginning of the century, the dominant critical discourse reversed itself to celebrate, instead, the joys of contamination and hybridization, Le Corps du cinéma and La Querelle des dispositifs put a stop to that elevation of this principle of mixture to insist on the uniqueness of a particular historical experience – what you call the “unique memory” of the spectator. Why did you move from having an open-minded position to one involving a defense of cinema? And what is the relationship between the first phase – the jaunt in the environs surrounding cinema – and the second – cinema “behind barricades”?
I find it difficult to evaluate the relationship between a history that might be characterized as objective – that which has occurred during the past two decades with respect to the history of cinema and the development of contemporary art – and the manner in which my personal relation with these two domains came to be formed. A major reason for the shifts you mention derived from various changes that occurred in the works themselves, and by the rise of discourses proclaiming the possibility of a death of cinema that they provoked.
8 - Arrested Images and “the Between-Images”
- Hilary Radner, University of Otago, Alistair Fox, University of Otago
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- 07 March 2018, pp 130-144
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[Bellour explains his concept of “between-images,” and comments on the status of the arrested image in relation to the time-image, suggesting how video was an instrument of transformation at a brief historical moment that is already in the past because of the advent of the digital. In the contemporary world, he suggests, the computer now enables a continuous, ideal passage between all the domains of words, images, painting, and photography, obliterating the boundaries that formerly distinguished them. He concludes this section by speculating on the nature of images, ways of forming them, and how they only make sense when related to psychic and physiological factors.]
Why do you prefer the notion of “dispositif” to that of “medium”?
I was very sensitive to the use of the notion of dispositif from the moment I had an impression that there was an impure scrambling taking place between moving images from cinema and those of contemporary art, and that, as a result, dispositifs that were widely disparate were beginning to be confused. At the time when I was working on the essays included in Between-the-Images, this issue preoccupied me to a much lesser extent, even though I was already using the term for the purposes of description. It is fascinating to note that in 1975, the same year (only a few months separated the separate publication projects), Jean-Louis Baudry used the term in the essay he contributed to the issue of Communications on “Psychanalyse et cinéma” that Christian Metz, Thierry Kuntzel, and I jointly edited: “Le dispositif: approches métapsychologiques de l’impression de réalité” [The dispositif: metapsychological approaches to the impression of reality]; and Foucault, for his part, introduced this word-idea forcefully, as we know, in Discipline and Punish. From then on, the term began to take off, being used by important authors (Deleuze, Agamben, etc.), and it is true that it is extremely useful, given that it allows one to identify specificities while simultaneously allowing one to avoid reducing them to an issue of the medium. On top of that, a dispositif has a constructive dimension, supposing from the outset the existence of an intersection between the psychic and mechanical aspects.
Contents
- Hilary Radner, University of Otago, Alistair Fox, University of Otago
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- Raymond Bellour
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Part 1 - Raymond Bellour: Cinema and the Moving Image
- Hilary Radner, University of Otago, Alistair Fox, University of Otago
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- 07 March 2018, pp 9-10
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Acknowledgments
- Hilary Radner, University of Otago, Alistair Fox, University of Otago
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- Raymond Bellour
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A Select Annotated Bibliography of the Publications of Raymond Bellour
- Hilary Radner, University of Otago, Alistair Fox, University of Otago
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- 07 March 2018, pp 185-209
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2 - The Digital Challenge: From the Theater to the Gallery
- Hilary Radner, University of Otago, Alistair Fox, University of Otago
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- Raymond Bellour
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A NEW ART
Raymond Bellour's work on video art, while a product of his own preoccupations, emerges within more general speculations about spectatorship before 1990, including such notions as “suture,” and Brechtian “distanciation,” or “alienation,” that marked film scholarship as it was widely discussed in France, in Britain, and to some degree in the United States, primarily among what were known in English for a variety of reasons as the “Screen” theorists, including their association with the journal Screen. Bellour, together with Thierry Kuntzel conceived of this new medium (or rather media as it turned out) as having the potential to transform the viewer's relationship to the moving image. In this regard, he introduced the concept of “le spectateur pensif,” or “pensive spectator,” recalling for many film theorists Bertolt Brecht's notion of an active, as opposed to passive, spectator. In Bellour's case, however, the pensive spectator, originating in cinema, but encouraged by new multi-media art installation (as distinct from Brecht's spectator), is not an entirely rational spectator, nor one who is completely sutured into the narrative as many scholars, in particular those associated with the journal Screen in the 1970s, deemed was the case with the spectator of classical cinema.
Thierry Kuntzel's influence on Bellour was fundamental at this juncture. Kuntzel (1948–2007), a film theorist turned video and then multi-media artist, used the possibilities of the new technologies with which he was presented to explore the ontological nature of the image. For Bellour, these same possibilities gave rise to new sets of relations between images and movement, as well as new relations among images from different media, including images arising out of traditional art forms, such as painting. He saw the nature of the image as thus being further transformed along the lines first observed by Walter Benjamin and then John Berger with regard to photography and the cinema. Photography was not only a new mechanical technique of representation, but changed forever the social and cultural understanding of the nature and function of an image through its capacity to reproduce the “same” image endlessly. Bellour argues for the need to see similarly sig-nificant, if not all-embracing, changes at the end of the twentieth century, postulating, among other things, that new technologies enable the use of images, especially moving images, as a kind of “writing.”
Introduction: Cinema and Its Discontents: The Place of Raymond Bellour in Film Theory from the Twentieth to the Twenty-first Century
- Hilary Radner, University of Otago, Alistair Fox, University of Otago
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Raymond Bellour, while one of the most influential early theorists of cinema and the moving image, remains less well known among contemporary film scholars than he should be, even though he has exerted a formative influence on the field at large. One reason for this neglect is that his work is scattered across a myriad of essays published in French, the majority of which have not been translated into English. Bellour has also shown himself to be an exceptionally subtle and complex thinker, which makes it doubly difficult to gain an overall impression of the coherency of his thought. A characteristic of his approach that is often baffling to readers trained in Anglo-American traditions is an awareness of the complexities inherent in any proposition, acknowledgement of which undermines the possibility of reaching a definitive conclusion based on simple generalizations. He also displays a propensity for metaphoric and other figurative forms of expression that can render his propositions elusive. In consequence, he often appears to contradict himself over time. Notwithstanding the fact that his way of thinking lies outside the mainstream of twentieth and twenty-first century film and media theory, the trajectory of his thought and his careful recording of his intellectual responses to developments in film as a medium, a technology, and an art provide a kind of signage that marks out the significant debates in research on the moving image over a period of more than fifty years. The purpose of this book, then, is to provide a pathway through his works that should lead the Anglo-American reader to a better appreciation and understanding of Bellour's theories and perspectives on a range of important topics that are currently topics of renewed interest and debate within film and media scholarship. It will do so by focusing on what may be regarded as a nexus of issues that form the core of his practice.
The coherency inherent in this large body of writing derives, at least in part, from the way that it represents a practice of analysis that developed and evolved with the emergence of cinema studies as a field of scholarly research. Through this practice, Bellour initiated and developed modes of analysis and perspectives that, while extremely influential, were soon incorporated as givens into scholarly research on film.
3 - Cinema and the Body: The Ghost in the Theater
- Hilary Radner, University of Otago, Alistair Fox, University of Otago
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LE CORPS DU CINÉMA
Bellour's magnum opus, Le Corps du cinéma: hypnoses, émotions, animalités (The Body of Cinema: Hypnoses, Emotions, Animalities), a massive volume of more than 500 pages, brings together many themes that have marked his exploration of classical cinema over the previous decades. Described as “the first large-scale work on the rhythmic and formal aspects of cinema that unify the animal, the viewer, and the production and unfolding of film,” the volume focuses on the relations among these last, within the context of a particular dispositif or apparatus. Bellour uses this term to refer to the “set-up” within which the viewer engages with the moving-image narrative or “the cinema-situation” that characterized the film experience at a certain moment in time – the period after the rise of the studios and before the dominance of television, roughly from 1925 to 1965, with a high degree of variation between national contexts. In Bellour’s, terms, the cinema-situation must meet the following requirements to be deemed to offer the cinema-experience (“le cinéma”) to a given spectator: it must consist of the projection of a film, in a darkened (“dans le noir”) theater (“salle de cinéma”) over a prescribed period of time (with a beginning and an end), in which the viewer sits with others at the screening (“une séance … collective”). These requirements constitute “the condition” that permits “a unique experience of perception and memory” (“une experience unique de perception et mémoire”). This experience defines the cinema spectator as a specific embodiment that any shift in the viewing situation changes, more or less.
For Bellour, only this cinema-situation (and the experience that it produces) “deserves to be called ‘cinema’” (“Et cela seul vaut d’être appellé ‘cinéma’”). Bellour sees his goal, in the above analysis, as moving toward an understanding of cinema as part of “an archeology,” in Foucault's terms, in which the cultural and social forces of the late eighteenth and of the nineteenth century came together to produce “psychoanalysis and cinema.” In this trajectory, both of the latter “appear to have been born together out of hypnosis, which, for Freud, led to an enlargement of the field of memory – an enlargement that cinema, in its own way, also achieved.”
Preface
- Hilary Radner, University of Otago, Alistair Fox, University of Otago
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Some may think that to attempt a synthetic overview of Raymond Bellour's major contributions to what is now known as film and media theory constitutes a violation of the very principles that he advocates, the most crucial being an attentiveness to specific art works, whether it be a film, a poem, or an installation, over time. Not coincidentally, he titles the longer version of the interview included here, published in French in September 2017 with Rouge Profond, as Dans la compagnie des oeuvres, “In the Company of the Work,” or even “In the Presence of the Work.” For Bellour, art comes before theory. Furthermore, for Bellour, whatever we can say about art will always be inadequate and incomplete with regard to the experience of the work itself.
Nevertheless, this volume proposes to offer a route, un parcours, into a very thickly wooded terrain of dense vegetation that must be examined in detail to understand its full effect and import. Bellour's corpus chronicles a complex journey, marked by twists and turns, that takes place over half a century, in which he explores the evolving new worlds of the moving image. His careful recording of that journey is such that the reader will inevitably find many points of entry (“des passages,” in Bellour's terms), through which he or she may join this scholar on his multi-faceted voyage of discovery. This study aims to offer one such point of entry, un passage, to the interested reader in the hope that she or he will find it useful in forming an understanding of this significant scholar's contribution to our knowledge of twentieth-century cinema and its avatars in the twenty-first century.
Bellour's writing style itself presents a potential impediment for the English-language reader, especially those with academic intentions. Philippe Azoury, writing for the trendy French publication Les Inrockuptibles, in his review of Bellour's third volume of collected articles, L’Entre-images 2: mots, images, explains, “The thought [thought-process] of Bellour is new, because it reacts though trafficking, rhizomes, hypertexts.” Azoury also notes that in the two volumes L’Entre-images and L’Entre-images 2, published ten years apart, “Bellour refers more and more frequently to the writings of Blanchot on Mallarmé,” suggesting the “French-ness” of the tradition in which Bellour himself approaches the work of art – that is, an approach that is deliberately hermetic, in a way that is characteristic of modernism itself.
Raymond Bellour
- Cinema and the Moving Image
- Hilary Radner, Alistair Fox
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 05 May 2021
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- 07 March 2018
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Providing a clear, systematic account of the evolution of Bellour's thought on the nature of cinematic representation, the impact of digital technology and the response of the spectator, this is an essential guide to the work of a major contemporary thinker.
5 - Formative Influences
- Hilary Radner, University of Otago, Alistair Fox, University of Otago
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[In this section of the interview, Bellour describes how he began to engage in film analysis in the 1960s, beginning with a sequence from Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, with the aim of establishing the way that it worked as a “text.” He proceeds to describe his personal encounters with major figures like Roland Barthes, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Michel Foucault, and his friendship with Christian Metz, suggesting how his interchanges with them helped to shape his own thinking, and how it diverged from theirs.]
The entire period leading up to May 1968, and after, was one of general excitement about theory. At this time, the very idea of criticism was reformulated: critical analysis discovered the tools that it still uses, to a large degree. In particular, this period dethroned artistic activity itself for a while, redefining it so that it became a transgressive, avant-gardist practice at the forefront of a historical moment. Several of your works reflect this radical atmosphere. Some of them, collected in Le Livre des autres at the beginning of the 1970s, extol the “renewed power of commentary,” as if the potentiality of all contemporary upheavals could take place in that form. How did you make your way through this theoretical field, from Barthes to Lévi-Strauss, and then Foucault? And how did this migration of concepts from the human sciences to cinema come about?
In 1968, I had begun teaching cinema (very much on a part-time basis) at Université Paris 1 [Pantheon-Sorbonne University], pursuing, in particular, the analyses that would later feature in my book The Analysis of Film. The most important of these was the analysis of a sequence, or more exactly a long fragment, from Hitchcock's The Birds. I saw it as an attempt to approach as closely as possible the materiality of what was then called “the filmic text,” and doing this provided the basis for my work on cinema during the years that followed. This was not as apparent at an intellectual level – where it appeared to be some kind of transgression – as it was at a practical level, because access to copies of a film at the time was very difficult. After that …
7 - Thierry Kuntzel and the Rise of Video Art
- Hilary Radner, University of Otago, Alistair Fox, University of Otago
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- 07 March 2018, pp 119-129
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[Bellour describes how his interest in video art grew out of his personal friendship with Thierry Kuntzel and the latter's growing interest in experimental filmmaking using the new technology, and how this interest prompted him to seek to understand how the new medium was leading to a modification of perception. He goes on to explain how video technology enables the production of images that escape the natural conditions deemed to constrain photography, also emphasizing the influence of painting on video art.]
Your book Between-the-Images was the fruit of your encounter with video, which led to a decentering of your work, a stroll along the edge, even to the antipodes of what had constituted your corpus up until then. How did you arrive at this dimension of your work?
To answer that requires me to retrace a bit of history. From the end of the 1970s, as we have seen, I was very closely linked to Thierry Kuntzel, both intellectually and emotionally, and I remained so right up to his death a few years ago. Shortly after the issue of Communications we did together, which was published in 1975, he progressively stopped writing in an explicitly theoretical mode in order to direct his work gently toward the creation of conceptual art in the first instance, and then video art soon after that. In a great burst of inspiration, when he was working at INA during 1979 and 1980, he made six films during this brief period of time . When I saw them, I experienced a real shock, like a revelation, with a strong feeling that I was seeing images that did not resemble anything I had encountered before, but demanded to be taken into consideration. I thought they involved something very different, extending beyond many of the things that I had glimpsed in experimental cinema up until then.
At this point, I need to add a parenthesis by recounting a little interlude. In 1972, I had been invited to the film festival at Hyères, devoted mainly to experimental cinema, on the pretext of evaluating whether the semiological methods could be applied to this different form of cinema, and, with this in mind, I had also managed to get Thierry Kuntzel invited.
10 - Hypnosis, Emotions, and Animality
- Hilary Radner, University of Otago, Alistair Fox, University of Otago
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- 07 March 2018, pp 155-174
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[In this section, Bellour explains why he thinks hypnosis is superior as a model for explaining the effects of cinema, on the grounds that it involves a somatic displacement that comes from outside the spectator. At the same time, he explains his objections to cognitivist film theory. Finally, Bellour recounts how his interest in animals, which began in the 1970s, derived from his perception of the way in which animal figures were being used in American cinema in films like Howard Hawks's Bringing up Baby and Monkey Business and Hitchcock's The Birds, which in turn led him to consider the issue of animality itself.]
A number of these questions – on the affective power of the image, the hypnotic state and the reflexivity that it maintains, and the play of suspension that it introduces – had been formulated in other terms by the filmmakers and theoreticians of the 1920s, in particular Epstein and Eisenstein. You only allude briefly to the latter.
I have to admit that I rather neglected Eisenstein, largely because others had accomplished remarkable work on both his films and his theoretical writings – Jacques Aumont, for example. Generally, I tend to avoid repeating what others have already said, and said well. In Le Corps du cinéma, I was content to include a small note on Eisenstein's relation to Disney, which I find fascinating, on the issue of the effects that can be produced in conjunction, moreover, with animality, but I am very aware that this mention falls well short of all that could be said concerning Eisenstein's thoughts on these matters. On the other hand, Epstein is very much present in my book, since he is one of the very rare authors to emphasize the overlap between emotion and hypnosis, in a way that is often dizzying. I read Epstein very early on, always with enthusiasm, in the beautiful edition of his writings in two volumes edited by Pierre Lherminier in 1974. I was also interested in the fact that Michaux had read his writings on alcohol and had cited him in one of his early works in 1922. In the context of this body of ideas, one should also mention a third name, that of Artaud, who also contributed, on another level, the idea of a psychic energy pertaining to the experience of cinema – but Deleuze has dealt with that magnificently.
4 - An Elegy for Cinema
- Hilary Radner, University of Otago, Alistair Fox, University of Otago
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WHAT CINEMA WAS
In the new millennium, returning to a preoccupation with classical cinema, Raymond Bellour argued, as discussed in the previous chapter, that hypnosis rather than the dream (as proposed in the view of Christian Metz) offers the most accurate metaphor for understanding the cinematic viewer's relationship to the screen narrative. Bellour posits a viewer caught by, and subject to, somatic responses, like an animal, that are basically emotional in nature (hence not under his or her rational control) and generated from outside him or her, but that he or she experiences as autogenic in origin. The physicality of these responses draws attention to the tenuous dividing line between that which is human and that which is animal, within a worldview that dispenses with “the soul” under modernity. Thus, Bellour maintains that the images of animals that appear in films “mirror” the condition of the spectator in the theater.
This strategy of reflexivity extends to other elements that are part of the cinematic experience, which, in Bellour's view, are consistently reproduced in rhetorical form within the film's narrative and mise en scène. The body of cinema is always minimally doubled, according to Bellour, for whom the body represented on the screen serves as the double of that of the spectator himself or herself sitting in the theater. The cinema is, then, an embodied experience in which it is not the ideas portrayed on the screen to which a spectator initially responds, but rather the emotions that the film evokes before the spectator may even consciously know what he or she has seen.
In this context, Raymond Bellour was one of the first scholars to stress how the radical transformations in technologies of the moving image had consequent ramifications in terms of the spectator's viewing experience. Defining what cinema was highlighted what it is not. If cinema was once characterized by the shared experience afforded theatrical audiences in the classical era, which produced a “unique” memory in the spectator that would mark the film retrospectively as an experience, this experience is no longer available to contemporary audiences who view and review films through any number of different platforms.
Raymond Bellour (1939– ): A Biographical Sketch
- Hilary Radner, University of Otago, Alistair Fox, University of Otago
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An understanding of the education, professional experiences, and cultural activities that have influenced Raymond Bellour's intellectual formation helps to explain the breadth of his research interests, as well as many of the distinctive dimensions of his film theory. What follows is designed to give a brief outline of the intellectual and cultural factors that shaped his preoccupations, the range of his interests, and the course of his career.
EARLY LIFE AND SCHOOLING
A native of Lyon, Raymond Bellour was born in that city on January 18, 1939, where he would remain until 1964, before relocating to Paris. A precocious child, Bellour began to read voraciously at a very young age, having read Racine and Homer by the age of ten, and having devoured the whole of Shakespeare by the age of fourteen. This passion for literature would persist through the whole of his career, leading him not only into literary scholarship as a parallel interest alongside his research into cinema, but also to become a creative writer in his own right.
High school was not a particularly gratifying experience for Bellour, who confesses that during this time he felt very restless, finding it difficult to remain cooped up in a classroom all day. Consequently, instead of undertaking the hypokhâgne (the preparatory class for advanced studies in arts and literature in the École normale supérieure), as would usually be expected of a youth with his precocity, he wanted to go on the stage, persuading his parents to allow him to enter the Conservatoire de Lyon at the end of high school with the intention of becoming an actor.
THEATRICAL EXPERIENCE
For the next five years, Bellour pursued theatrical activities, first at the Conservatoire, and then with the playwright and director Roger Planchon, who, in 1952, had founded the Théâtre de la Comédie on the rue des Marronniers, in Lyon. As a member of this company he acted in several productions directed by Planchon of plays by Molière, including Les Fourberies de Scapin and Le Médecin malgré lui, in which he played opposite the acclaimed French actress Catherine Rouvel. During this time, Bellour also served as assistant to the director.